


epicenter

by prittyspeshul



Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Blood, F/M, M/M, Medical Inaccuracies, natural disaster inaccuracies, semi-graphic depictions of injury
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 08:49:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6899260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prittyspeshul/pseuds/prittyspeshul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He didn't realize the world had been shaking until it stopped."</p><p>An earthquake catches some members of the roster on their Japanese tour.</p>
            </blockquote>





	epicenter

**Author's Note:**

> This story is dedicated to leadusnot for being a fabulous beta-reader, as usual.

It started as a rumble, a low, deep rumble that made the hairs on the back of Dean’s neck stand up. The rumble slowly grew to a roar, until the windows were vibrating as hard as his chattering teeth. The roar expanded until it was all he could hear, until spiderweb cracks crawled down the windows and a hearty push from behind sent him sprawling under the nearest piece of furniture just before the first one shattered, spraying fragments of glass and wood where he had stood a moment before. The fluorescent overhead lamps were banging against the ceiling, spitting sparks as they burst; there was a sickening lurch, a screeching groan, and gone was the ground from beneath him--he was sliding backward until he stopped suddenly, smashing his head into the surface behind him so hard he saw stars dancing among the sprays of electricity. The floor was at a weird angle, tiles rippling where they were whole and jutting abruptly into darkness where they weren’t, and there was water spraying from somewhere overhead.

He didn’t realize the world had been shaking until it stopped.

There was a moment, a single, silent moment, where nothing seemed to move; even the dust motes seemed to pause in their mid-air swirl through splintered beams of light (the lights that were still on, clinging fitfully to errant sparks of electricity, each burst fainter and shorter). He looked around, gasping air into his lungs, everything so loud in the stillness—he looked for something he couldn’t find, at the frozen spirals of dust and concrete and twisted metal at bizarre angles in front of him, spikes of building twisted out like the gnashing teeth of a demon; at the water spraying in its arrhythmic muted sputter and catching the light, creating prisms of rainbows that shone for seconds before being devoured by the hellscape of flickering shadow.

There was that moment, and then there were the screams.  

All of the sound crashed in at once—screams, high pitched and wailing and disturbingly familiar; sobs; crashes and crunches and sounds of settling that silenced everything else. His breathing was short and shallow now, choked with dust and panic and stale, damp air, and he tried to slam his hands over his ears to cut out the noise—he could not could not _would not_ hear familiarity in those shrieks—but found one of his arms wouldn’t come. The pain was an afterthought until it wasn’t, and then it was fiery agony, an electric brand in his shoulder; he looked over and wished he hadn’t, bile rising in his dry throat as he closed his eyes against the sight of the inches of bloody metal rod protruding from his upper arm.

He sat still for a few moments, attempting to calm the throbbing in his head and shoulder, but it proved a vain attempt against the onslaught of hysterics around him, the crescendo of agony and terror building until it clawed into his closed eyes and wrenched them open with a sudden, horrifying realization. He was alone. In all the noise, he was alone.

His scream joined the throng without any consent on the part of his brain.

“ROMAN!”

His voice was wet and slurred, his tongue tripping over the fear that made it heavy and sloppy around the familiar name. There was only the dripping of another spray of brackish water in response, and he swallowed, mind racing to fill the void of seconds with possibilities: he was too far away, he was unconscious, he was helping someone, he was trapped like Dean was, he was bleeding to death, he was already dead— all of the air left him in a staggering gust, because no no no Roman couldn’t be, Dean wouldn’t allow him to be, but there was a very real and very horrifying possibility that he was. 

Dean needed to move. He needed to move now and find Roman. He needed to get free, and to do that he needed to determine the extent to which he was trapped. In short, he needed to find out exactly how much of that rebar was embedded in his triceps. He flexed his arm, gritting his teeth against the fresh shockwaves of pain in his shoulder, twisting his chest and maneuvering himself until he was parallel to the rod. The effort left him drenched in sweat and trembling, because holy virgin mary mother of jesus Christ **fuck** did that hurt, but he was in a much better position to survey his injury.

He really didn’t like what he saw. The bar had gone clear through his arm just below the shoulder, thankfully missing the bone and instead spearing just the muscle. He must have struck it dead-on, because it stuck more or less completely straight from his body (small favors, he thought, bitterly, trying not to laugh because he wasn’t entirely sure it wouldn’t escape as a sob). The entry itself was pretty clean, minus the tearing his jerking about had caused; the worst part was just how deeply it had sunk (he had sunk? He wasn’t sure what the proper semantics would be in this case). His body rested against the surface from which the rebar protruded, and the end of the rod was even with his other shoulder.

Dean was well and truly fucked.  

He relaxed his arm and settled against the wall again, wiping his damp hair and face with his uninjured arm and making a mental list of his options. It was ultimately a very short list, really consisting of only one item: get free. He sucked in a deep breath and jerked forward, hoping to drag himself loose through momentum alone, but there was only a tug and fresh pain in the overflowing well of suffering that had once been his arm. He flexed again, trying to get a grip on the end of the bar with the vague idea of pulling himself off that way, but it was a doomed effort. He was at such an odd angle for leverage that any forward progress put the stress of his own weight on his already exhausted muscles; and every movement brought a fresh spurt of blood from his arm, which made the metal almost impossibly slick.

The steady bursts of water had diminished to little more than dribbles when he finally gave up and let his body crumple against the wall again, and for lack of anything better—really, anything at all to do, Dean counted the splats of droplets crashing against his legs. His pants were drenched, clinging to his legs, but for the most part, his shirt had stayed dry—if he contrived to ignore, of course, the sticky-damp patch at his trapped shoulder. He shivered as another splash hit his calf, setting off a new wave of pain in his arm. He clenched and unclenched the fist of his free arm, kicking his feet in a swell of rage at his own helplessness. He was trapped and bleeding, and he had no idea where Roman was or what his fate had been.

“Hello?”

He started, craning his neck toward the direction he thought the sound came from, straining his eyes to make out anything in the dimness. The lights had finally given out in one last magnificent sparkling shower while he had been inspecting his arm, and now the only light was what weak illumination filtered in through the cracks in the rubble and the clouds of dust around them. After the initial burst of noise, the cacophony had subsided to a dull throb, and his ears had accustomed to the soft whimpers and strangled sobs while he had been engaged in his vain attempts to free himself. No one had answered him when he cried out earlier, so he had assumed no one was close enough to hear him; but then again, he hadn’t answered anyone else in that clusterfuck of noise.

The silence reigned thick and heavy for a moment, and he thought he had imagined the voice, but then it repeated, “Hello? Is someone here?”

Dean tried to respond and inhaled another spurt of the water in his haste; he hacked a few times, then swallowed, his voice hoarse despite the dampness in his mouth, “Over here!”

The wait to hear a response, on Dean’s end, was unbearable; his every nerve was taut, shivering in anticipation at every dry rustle of a sliding piece of drywall shrapnel or distant crunch of more concrete collapsing as the rubble settled. Eventually, though, the random noises resolved into a clear series of awkward shuffles and heavy breaths, until a dark head dusted with powdered concrete appeared in the periphery of his vision.

“Dean?”

He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until it rushed out of him in a single gasp.

“Finn!”

The Irishman’s head bobbed closer, and Dean turned his head to avoid the inevitable cloud of dust as the rest of his body wriggled into view. Finn maneuvered himself carefully opposite, settling upright against what looked to be a partial piece of the wall Dean leaned against, and the pair surveyed each other with the critical gaze of those who deal in pain to make a living. At first glance, Finn seemed to have gotten the better deal—arms and legs in the right places, no visible metal fucking rod sticking out of his shoulder—but Dean noticed the way he held his chest, one arm wrapped protectively around his gut; the laborious nature of his breathing; and the quiet shudders that traveled down his arms as he leaned to the side and spit wetly. They were equally solemn as their eyes met—it went without saying, they were both pretty fucked.

Finn asked a question, the words falling like it hurt him to speak. “Is there anyone else?”

Dean shook his head, tilting his face down. “I don’t know. Not close. Leastaways, anyone that’s makin’ noise. I kind of slid a ways, when—when the floor split. This nice metal bar here broke my fall.”

Finn barked out an approximation of a laugh, cut short by a gasp of pain he couldn’t keep quiet and another wet splat as he spit again. He shifted against his perch, drawing a knee up and sending a misshapen chunk of building material skittering towards Dean; he kicked it out of the way, his attempt to make a weak joke dying half-formed somewhere in his mouth as the rock kept dancing, and an ominous and familiar rumble rose from the depths—of the building, of the bowels of the earth, it may as well have been the same—and the floor was swaying sickeningly again, the lights singing against the ceiling, debris sliding on the ground. Dean clenched his fists, seeking something solid to hold onto, and he felt the warmth of Finn press into his side and clutch at his arm. He bowed his head, trying not to hear the screams that had suddenly exploded into terrified life again, trying not to pick out familiar tones in the cacophony of fear, trying only to hear Finn’s soft, panicked drawl scrabbling through what sounded less like a prayer and more like a plea.

The swaying settled as quickly as it had begun, the shells of lights banging once or twice more before falling limply from their overstretched wires. Dean inhaled, tasting iron, and realized he had bitten his tongue. The screams settled, too, into sobs, peaking once when the building gave another solitary shimmy and several chunks of concrete rained down with dull thumps. He studiously ignored the stuttering breaths slowing to normal at his side, just as Finn made no comment when Dean extricated his hand to swipe roughly at his cheeks.

Both of their heads shot up as another rumble, this one of a different character, echoed through the still-shivering brick. A dark cloud of foreboding swirled in the pit of Dean’s stomach, and he nudged the man sitting next to him. “We need to move.”

Finn turned halfway, one of his elbows tapping the wall they both rested on. “Accompanied by this thousand pound hunk of concrete?”

Dean swallowed, closing his eyes and pressing the open wound in his tongue against his bottom teeth.  “No.”

Finn’s voice was harsh and heated as he snapped, “I’m not just gonna fucking leave you here, am I. You’re the only fucking living person I’ve found—” Even in the low light Dean could see the glitter in his eyes. The words echoed in his head— _only living person—only living—_

His own voice was sharper than he intended when he snapped, “I didn’t mean leave me, jesus Christ, I’m not a fucking martyr. I meant you’re gonna have to get me the fuck off this bar.”

He could feel the other man’s eyes on him, and Dean tilted his head back to rest against the wall. The water had finally, blessedly, stopped dripping, but his hair was still wet, and a cascade of moisture trailed down his neck at the movement. Finn’s voice, when he finally spoke, was astonishingly steady.

“You could bleed to death if I do.”

“I can still bleed to death if you don’t.” He opened his eyes and faced the Irishman, whose own face was a careful mask. The two men stared at each other, blue-grey testing blue, until Finn nodded. Dean exhaled, closing his eyes again and tossing a cobbled-together prayer in the direction he roughly hoped was up.

Finn stretched Dean’s arm out, earning a less-than-quiet hiss of “fuck,” followed by several other increasingly creative expletives as he manipulated the entrance wound. Without any preamble, with barely a discernable motion that Dean caught, Finn took hold of each of his shoulders and pulled.

He considered himself well-versed in the various kinds of suffering a human body could endure. He had spent the better part of his life in a wrestling ring, more than once for a promotion that whetted its rabid fans with wrestler blood—he had grown up basically teaching himself how to stay alive on the streets of decidedly un-gentrified neighborhoods in Cincinnati—and he had no way to describe the absolute torturous agony that rocked through his chest when he was dragged forward on the bar. White bolts of lightning arced behind his eyelids in time with the daggers of heat that rippled through his abused shoulder, and when the blistering pain faded, he realized he was shaking. Worse, he realized he was only halfway through, Finn’s arms still braced around him, inches of metal still protruding from his arm.

“Fuck,” he panted.

“I’m sorry,” the soft apology melted into the lightning as he was pulled once more.

When the whiteness receded, he was bent double, dryly heaving nothingness out of his stomach and trembling like he was coming down from an adrenaline high—but he was free. Finn didn’t seem to be in much better condition, gasping for air next to him, face drained of color. He offered him a shaky smile, wanting to apologize for the most definitely atrocious things he had shouted, but he was cut off with his mouth open as a tremulous cry rang out.

“Someone! I heard you! Please—please come find me…”

Dean didn’t think it was possible, but he watched Finn’s face drain of even more color.

“That’s Bayley,” he muttered, as the voice cried out again.

“Please—I heard you—” The voice cut off in a choked sob, then continued, “I can’t see—”

Dean grabbed Finn’s arm, nodding toward the sound. “Let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> Because I don't have enough unfinished stories posted yet.


End file.
